60 ArtLung posts from February, 2004

“While the Vatican does allow the use of Latin Masses, it insists that the latin version of the new Missal be used rather than the older Tridentine Mass, which only can be celebrated with a special dispense. These Parishes are approved by Rome and their local Bishop. There are now Parishes dedicated to the exclusive celebration of the Mass said according to the 1962 Missal, itself based on the original Tridentine Missal of 1570.”

And Mom, don’t worry, I can say certifiably I don’t truck with these splinter-Catholics. It’s just interesting to me, the history and controversies.

I find the efforts of groups to splinter away from any religious group fascinating. The whole of the history of Christianity is of groups seeing things differently. My wish would be that people learn to agree to disagree in peace.

Lots of new additions. I had a dedicated email address for keeping up with that site, and it was 99% spam. I’ve killed the account in favor of using my feedback form. This gets rid of lots of the crap.

(I meant to post this a few weeks ago…, but I never finished it… incomplete, but check it out…)

The other day I had lunch with an old pal from High School. This was someone with whom I’d not spent any time since the reunion in 1997. I went to school at USDHS, and I was thinking of posting here on “what has changed since we last talked extensively. I think quite a lot, actually.

Pop Review | Stew: A Troubadour Travels in Circles, With Lives Tangled in His Own: “Onstage Stew was as much an actor as a singer. His voice is genial and adequate, but he had the rubber-faced presence to make each song vivid. He set up songs with droll introductions and turned himself into a secular preacher, a befuddled tripping teenager and a frustrated gay Ken doll who would prefer G.I. Joe to Barbie. Without cynicism or naive optimism, he understands human weaknesses and all the fascinating trouble they can cause.

google for import opml for more information on importing the file into your RSS Reader. e.g.: FeedDemon. In NetNewsWire, one must save the OPML file, then save the file, and import then. Unfortunately, Safari does not save the file properly, it insists on adding an .xml extension. So you have to change that. Irritating, but not insurmountable.

It would be nice to be able to import subscriptions “live” from the web.

joe crawford dot com is launching. It’s an online business card. An old school “one page” website . it describes my two main professional activities.

The “BIG SECRET” I’ve been referring to is basically that I am now an Evangelist for LAMP Host, who is a great hosting company located here in San Diego. I’ve been a customer and have referred people there for a long time, but never had any sort of formal relationship. Starting last week that relationship began full time. My role will be the sales and marketing of top quality web hosting from LAMP Host. At the moment I’m working on my elevator speech and beginning to do networking in earnest. I attended a rather small computer consultant meeting tonight, and got to practice and start putting feelers out there. It felt pretty good. Last week I spent a great deal of time learning the ins and outs of the business, getting a feel for the underlying technologies and systems. It’s good stuff, and I’m excited to represent it.

In the interests of “eating my own dog food” — a phrase coined to describe the process by which companies actually use what they sell — I’m slowly migrating some of my websites to LAMP Host. So far I’m liking what I see.

The other big thing I’m doing is freelance web stuff — building websites, fixing bugs, that sort of thing.

If folks have any questions about all this, please feel free to contact me.

Today I walked to school. Not bad, and much better than what I did this week, which was drive and park.

City College stinks for parking. Why I didn’t walk before I don’t know is that I thought it would be easier, and I was lazy. It’s less than a mile from here to there. Not too bad. But being able to drive gives me the ability to come and go from campus however I wish.

According to CPI, the three largest fundraisers in the presidential campaign at this time are Howard Dean with more than $25 million; John Kerry with more than $20 million; and, of course, President George W. Bush with $85.2 million (as of Sept. 30, 2003).

As has been reported, Bush plans to build a war chest of some $200 million for the election. His top major donors include financial firms Merrill Lynch & Co., Credit Suisse First Boston, UBS Paine Webber, and Goldman Sachs Group. The President’s top career donor is the scandal-ridden Enron Corp.

Kerry’s top donors include Fleet Boston Financial Corp., Time Warner, and a variety of major law firms. Time Warner, as we know, is the world’s largest media conglomerate. Among a variety of media outlets, it also owns Internet giant America On Line and CNN – a virtual cheerleader for Kerry.

The research Center does not cite any major donors for Dean. As we know, the majority of his contributors are ordinary citizens who donate an average of $77 dollars. Dean’s ‘special interest group’ is the American people.

This big-picture notion of reality, existence, and the world as it is dates back 2,400 years to the Greek philosopher Plato. Plato believed that what’s real isn’t the things you can touch and see: your computer, your desk, those empty barrels in Iraq that Bush thought were full of chemical weapons. What’s real is the general idea of these things. The idea of a computer. The idea of a desk. The idea of an Iraqi threat to the United States. Whether you actually have a computer or a desk, or whether Saddam Hussein actually had chemical weapons, is less important than the larger truth. The abstraction is the reality.

Plato’s successor, Aristotle, took a different view. He thought reality was measured by what you could touch and see. That’s the definition of reality on which modern science was founded. It’s the definition Colin Powell used when he told the world Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. It’s the definition David Kay used when he set out to find the weapons. Kay and Powell are dismayed by our inability to see and touch the weapons. But Bush isn’t. He isn’t going to let Aristotle’s reality distract him from Plato’s.

There are 9 versions of RSS, all of which are incompatible with various other versions. RSS 0.90 is incompatible with Netscape’s RSS 0.91, Netscape’s RSS 0.91 is incompatible with Userland’s RSS 0.91, Netscape’s RSS 0.91 is incompatible with RSS 1.0, Userland’s RSS 0.91 is incompatible with RSS 0.92, RSS 0.92 is incompatible with RSS 0.93, RSS 0.93 is incompatible with RSS 0.94, RSS 0.94 is incompatible with RSS 2.0, and RSS 2.0 is incompatible with itself.

This commentary, however, is not about the merits of Howard Dean. If a mildly progressive, Internet-driven, young white middle class-centered, movement-like campaign such as Dean’s – flush with money derived from unconventional sources, backed by significant sections of labor, reinforced by big name endorsements and surging with upward momentum – can be derailed in a matter of weeks at the whim of corporate media, then all of us are in deep trouble. The Dean beat-down should signal an intense reassessment of media’s role in the American power structure. The African American historical experience has much to offer in that regard, since the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements were born in a wrestling match with an essentially hostile corporate (white) media. However, there can be no meaningful discussion of the options available to progressive forces in the United States unless it is first recognized that the corporate media in the current era is the enemy, and must be treated that way.

I’ve been pretty disgusted by the manner of the de-annointing of Dean by Corporate Media. He does unprecedented things with financing (NO HUGE CORPORATE DONORS) and for this, he gets media punishment. But some of us aren’t buying this nonsense. I’m remembering this lesson about the media very well. The media cannot be trusted anymore than they can be thrown.

San Diego Bloggers now includes Google Adsense Ads. I have pondered including advertising in some of my sites for some time, and now SDB includes them, as of yesterday. I’m curious to see how well they work — or don’t work.

“Since the end of the war, journalists have found no shortage of sources willing t criticize the administration. (Even Colin Powell, in a recent press conference, admitte that, contrary to his assertions at the United Nations, he had no ‘smoking gun’ proof of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.) The Washington Post has been especially aggressive in exposing the administration’s exaggerations of intelligence, its inadequate planning for postwar Iraq, and its failure to find weapons of mass destruction. Barton Gellman, who before the war worked so hard to ferret out Iraq’s ties to terrorists, has, since its conclusion, written many incisive articles about the administration’s intelligence failures.

The contrast between the press’s feistiness since the end of the war and its meekness before it highlights one of the most entrenched and disturbing features of American journalism: its pack mentality. Editors and reporters don’t like to diverge too sharply from what everyone else is writing. When a president is popular and a consensus prevails, journalists shrink from challenging him. Even now, papers like the Times and the Post seem loath to give prominent play to stories that make the administration look too bad. Thus, stories about the increasing numbers of dead and wounded in Iraq–both American and Iraqi–are usually consigned to page 10 or 12, where they won’t cause readers too much discomfort.”

Here you will find everything you need to know about this wonderful memorial. The LifeGem is a certified, high quality diamond created from the carbon of your loved one as a memorial to their unique and wonderful life.

Inside you will find complete explanations on everything from how this unique process works, to where and how to obtain your own LifeGem diamond – whether the need is now or sometime in the future.

In the name of national security and of protecting us from the mad men of our times they spur the Congress to pass laws that strip away citizen’s rights to privacy and civil liberty.

The phrase ‘Don’t tread on me!’ expresses the attitude of a mentally healthy public that understands that all governments, given the chance, will try to reduce the ability of the people to remove them from power. They do this by brute force, as in the Iraq of Saddam Hussein or, a nibble at a time, as now in the U.S., until they have sufficient powers to tread on us all.

In the last issue of Crypto-Gram I published a couple of security essays that had a political component. I was surprised by the number of e-mails I received from people accusing me of bashing Bush (or worse). American politics may be getting vitriolic, but I think it’s worth stepping back and looking at the political security landscape.

I believe that the Bush administration is using the fear of terrorism as a political tool. That being said, I’m not sure a Democrat would do anything different in Bush’s place. Fear is a powerful motivator, and it takes strong ethics to resist the temptation to abuse it. I believe the real problem with America’s national security policy is that the police are in charge; that’s far more important than which party is in office.

Some of the Democratic presidential candidates for president have been more rational about security, but none have discussed security in terms of trade-offs. On the Republican side, I’ve read some criticisms of Bush’s heavy-handed security policies. Certainly the traditional Republican ideals of personal liberty and less government intervention are in line with smart security. And have the people who accuse me of hating Republicans forgotten that the Clipper Chip initiative was spearheaded by the Clinton administration?

The Republicans don’t have a monopoly on reducing civil liberties in the United States.

Rational security is not the sole purview of any political party. Fighting stupid security does not have to be partisan. Bush’s White House has done more to damage American national security than they have done to improve it. That’s not an indictment of the entire Republican party; it’s a statement about the current President, his Attorney General, and the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. It’s a statement about the current political climate, where the police — and I use this term to encompass the FBI, the Justice Department, the military, and everyone else involved in enforcing order — and their interests are put ahead of the interests of the people. My personal politics on non-security issues are not relevant.

Bruce S’s position here is interesting. He’s a security guy. He makes assessments about security. To say that he makes an assessment and is then “bashing” or “anti-Bush” says everything about our current political climate.

We must be free to speak our minds and make criticisms without people assuming we are “bashing” everyone and everything about those we criticize.

In a country with free discourse, this is the baseline. Unfortunately, the way things are spun — by media, by politicians — everyone — this is getting harder.

Now that you’ve been at it for a few years, what do you think is the single most useful aspect of keeping an online journal? Self-reflection? A “backup-brain?” Form of expression? What do *you* get out of it that you most value?

I think the thing that’s best for me is as an “outlet” — a kind of pressure valve when things get rough. In good times, it’s nice to be able to write, but when things are bad, writing is a great mechanism for articulating my feelings and letting off steam.

Second best is indeed as a junk drawer for my thoughts and when things happen. When did I take a leave of absence? When did I move? It’s in the blog. What was that link for the funny David Hasselhoff video? When did I work on such-and-such project? It’s in the blog.

Two weeks ago Leah and I had a small ceremony and let them go, she took the photo above to commemorate their passing.

I recently bought some new shoes. This is a rather big step, because I despise shopping for clothes and I despise purchasing shoes most of all. But as you can see above, it was time.

It’s been a trying week. This weekend I’ve been mostly working a freelance project that is good stuff, but tight deadline-wise.

School is going fine. I’m kicking Java’s ass! Spanish is okay, though I misunderstood the instructions for some homework and missed a day 2 weeks ago from feeling poorly, so I’m turning on the diligence full-blast. Statistics is fine, I enjoy that, and hope to turn some of my new statistics knowledge into some code for the lab and for WebSanDiego.org.

I have some other freelance stuff percolating as well. When something finally launches, I’ll be posting about it, but for now things are either hush hush, or not quite done enough to post about.

The upside is that the checks are clearing on these non-public work projects.

I’m looking forward to an improved week this week. A bit less stress and complexity.

“I remember [in the early ’80s] seeing posters for the small, semi-portable version of the Apple IIc,” he says. “Quite a lot of what I subsequently imagined in my early science fiction simply came from seeing that ad in a bus stop. I didn’t know anything about it technologically. I just thought if it’s that small and that nicely styled, everything is changing.”

…

The creative process for him has two stages. The writing is preceded by a long period of “sitting grumpily, staring out the window.” That explains why his nine books, all of which are still in print, have appeared at unpredictable intervals. “The typing on the keyboard takes about a year. The staring out the window can be any length of time and is usually harder.” He’s now grumpily contemplating his next novel, another present-day tale.

Sacrifice is a good word. Time to take stock. It’s a good thing, to examine oneself. Find out more about Lent.

San Diegans — enjoy the rain! It’s good to get washed clean.

I have not been particularly reflective here in the blog of late. I think it’s time to do more of it. I’ve been coasting too long.

Today my thoughts are scattered all about. There’s Spanish class, Statistics and Java. There’s python. There’s 1997 websites (you can’t have enough rollovers!). There’s laundry to be done. There’s a W-2 from last year that still has yet to arrive. There are lists of TO-DO’s a mile long. And the thing I have to remind myself is: one thing at a time, one hour at a time, one day at a time. Goals are great, but life must be experienced step by baby-step. (And yes, I am making a What About Bob? reference there.